Wife Living Dangerously (2 page)

“Which were… ?” I ask.

“Which were, ‘Can I see my penis one more time before you throw it out?’ Okay. So. Now Randy thinks Angelina Jolie is some
kind of freak. And I never have to hear about her again.” She smiles exultantly. “Do I pass?” Everyone agrees that Frankie’s
confession qualifies.

It is Annie’s turn. “Oh, this definitely falls under the miscellaneous category,” she says, putting her knuckle between her
teeth. “Oh, God. I hate to admit this. Please don’t think I’m awful.”

“Just say it,” Frankie demands.

“Okay. Here it goes.” She takes a deep breath and cringes in anticipation of our response. “I don’t pick up after Schatzi.
Ever.”

“Wait a second. I’ve
seen
you pick up after your dog,” I say. This really was a revelation. All residents of Larkspur Estates are bound by a subdivision
covenant that states, explicitly, that you’ve got to clean up after your dog. Other regulations include the proper storage
of trash cans (out of view), parking of cars (never on the street), use of yard signs (prohibited except for the two-week
period before election day). Annie was president of the neighborhood association for three years straight. She knew the dog
poop rules better than anyone.

“No, you’ve seen me
pretend
to pick up after my dog. I just bend over and move a tissue around here and there so it
looks
like I’m picking something up but I always just leave it there. Oh, big deal. He’s a miniature dachshund. You can hardly
see his shit. Besides, it’s all organic, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it? Will someone say something? Oh, God, I’m horrible!” Annie
sighs heavily. “Well, friends. There you have it.”

“Good grief,” says Frankie, “this game used to be
fun.
Dog poop, Annie? For the love of Jesus and Mary.” She tears open another bag of peanut M&M’s. “Julie, please tell me you
can do better than dog poop.” The candle’s small flame wavers as a sudden warm gust muscles through the screen door.

“Don’t be so sure.” I search my memory in futility for some transgression that might satisfy my friends but what’s the point
when I have never had an overdue library book, when I always correct cashiers when they make mistakes in my favor, and I don’t
lie, unless you count the white ones like telling Lala Townsend she looked great after she’d lost all her hair from chemotherapy.
I had preserved my virginity until Michael and I were engaged, and even then I felt a little guilty. I suppose I could mention
the time I told the pizza guy that yes, my eyes really were that green when I knew it was the tinted contacts that impressed
him. Or I could tell them about the time I switched a store-bought pecan pie from its original foil tin into my own glass
pie dish so other parents at the Brownies pot luck might think I’d baked it myself (although if anyone asked I would have
told them the truth).

“I’ve got one,” I say, finally. “Category: sex. I guess.” I dip my pinkie into the hot wax that pools at the top of the candle
and watch it harden on my finger. I am stalling. “Well, it was a Wednesday. No. Thursday. I was expecting a UPS delivery.
My mother had told me to expect a package, some gifts for the kids. So, you know that UPS guy. The cute one?”

“Yes. The one with the ponytail,” Frankie says.

“And that amazing ass.” Annie smiles beatifically.

“Uh-huh. That’s the one.”

I ask you, is there a woman in this town who
doesn’t
know this particular UPS driver? His hair is the color of butterscotch syrup, the ponytail unexpected and thrilling. He wears
shorts even in the winter and the curly blond hair on his legs shimmers in the afternoon sun as he races up the walk and you
wish he’d slow down just a little as he jogs back to the truck. Sometimes he waves as he’s pulling away from the curb. No
one knows his name.

I pick out four blue M&M’s that, contrary to popular belief, will absolutely melt in your hands if you are nervous enough.

“As I was saying, I knew he’d be coming sometime that day, so…” My friends lean in. The room is quiet as a mausoleum.
“I’m
saying
I made a special
effort
to look
nice.
I looked like crap all day but when I knew he was coming I put on makeup. Just for
him.
That’s a big deal for me, you know? I’m
married,
remember?”

Annie is shaking her head as if I am the most pathetic excuse for a woman she has ever known. I blow out the candle. “Game
over. I don’t know about you guys but I can hardly keep my eyes open.”

“That’s it? That’s your whole story?” Frankie is frowning.

“What else did you want to hear? That I met him at the door wearing a swimsuit? That I told him I liked his package?”

“That would be a start.” Annie sucks an ice cube into her mouth and pops it back into the glass. “Were you thinking you might
try to seduce him?”

Why would I want to seduce the UPS guy when I’ve got a husband whose lovemaking is as much an expression of adoration as it
is an act of sexual impulse. Michael knows my body’s idiosyncrasies the way Yo-Yo Ma knows his cello, approaching me with
intuition, touching me with devotion and also precision. It’s true that Michael and I haven’t found much time for sex. He
seems to be toiling longer and later at work and sometimes we go full days without more than a few words between us, let alone
physical contact.

“It’s just that,” I continue, lamely, “I think he’s good-looking. And I wanted to look nice when he stopped by.”

“Why?” Annie asks.

“I don’t know. Just because he’s cute, I guess.”

“Let’s review the facts as we know them,” Frankie says. “You put on lip gloss so you’d look nice for the UPS guy. He gives
you a package, you sign for it, you close the door. End of story?”

“Not just lip gloss. Blush too.”

“Jesus, Julia, you are a fucking bore.” Annie delivers this line with the finality of a game show host. I’m sorry. That’s
incorrect. You’re out of the game. Annie has always said that I give off clear and indisputable married vibes. Even the meter-reader,
widely known in our neighborhood for his glib lechery, will not flirt with me. “You work for the Bentley Institute, for Christ’s
sake, and this is the best you can come up with? Good God, woman.”

Yes, that’s right, I work for the Bentley Institute. As in, Eliza A. Bentley, the first American scientist to study, quantify,
and demystify human sexual behavior. As in “The Annual Bentley Report on Sexual Behavior.” As in the Bentley Museum, the world’s
largest collection of erotica and sexual artifacts, available for viewing by appointment only, and only if you have the appropriate
academic credentials. You can’t just walk in off the street and ask to see the Egyptian dildos.

“I think what Annie’s trying to say,” Frankie injects, gesticulating imploringly, “is that it wouldn’t kill you to live a
little dangerously. You don’t have to do everything by the book, Julia. You need to get yourself some joie de vivre.”

Not exactly a news flash. I’ve walked a circumscribed and sanitary path my whole life. My mother never had to ask me to wear
a coat over my Halloween costume because I insisted on it. I never went on roller coasters, refused to play Seven Minutes
in Heaven, never peeked at my presents before Christmas Eve, actually came straight home after the senior prom. I was a hall
monitor, a junior crossing guard, and named “most reasonable” in my high school yearbook, a category I think they made up
just for me. While my roommates in college rolled and passed around joints, I sipped diet soda and studied for finals and
wore earplugs to muffle the sound of the stereo and their silliness. But for all my righteous living I am suddenly willing
to admit that my friends have something I lack, a carefree and playful quality I strongly suspect men find sexy. I suppose
it was that same quality that drew my husband to Susie Margolis but I’d rather not think about that right now.

My mother has joie de vivre. My mother was also a barmaid who drank freely on the job, divorced my father before I was born,
brought lovers to our tiny apartment, and regularly wrote checks in amounts well above our bank balance. For years I thought
that “Rules were made to be broken” was a phrase my mother herself had coined. Trina McElvy showed me how to sneak into the
movies, steal your neighbor’s newspaper, and switch price tags on sunglasses. She did all these things with the certitude
it was her God-given right as an American to flout the rules. She encouraged me to forge her signature on school forms. (“What’s
the big deal? You know I’d sign it anyway.”) When she bounced a check she always insisted she was just a crappy bookkeeper,
that’s all.

My mother was staffing the beverage table at a Girl Scouts ice cream social when the police came for her with charges of bank
fraud. She kept her head bent and continued pouring lemonade into Dixie cups even as the two police officers approached the
table and made clear their intent to arrest her.

“There are forty-five thirsty Girl Scouts in this room, sir, and I’m going to make sure every one of them gets a lemonade,”
she said, not once looking up from her pouring.

The cops were two ruinous ink blots on a perfect canvas of Easter pastels, of mothers and daughters in long sweeping skirts
and ruffled blouses, yellow daffodils on every table, pink and baby blue crepe paper streamers twisted from one end of the
room to the other. My mother glanced toward me and asked if they wouldn’t mind skipping the handcuffing part and they agreed.
The bald one grabbed a cup of lemonade on the way out. I sat with Katie Lender and her mother for the rest of the event except
for the half hour I spent throwing up in the bathroom. Sour, regurgitated chocolate ice cream spattered on the toilet seat
and across the scalloped white collar of my new dress. My mother promised me that she would be home by dinner and somehow
she managed to make good on her promise. I was in third grade and I refused to go back to school so she found another rental
fifteen miles away and I enrolled in a new school district. Every day for nine weeks she drove back to town to fulfill her
community restitution sentence, picking up trash along the highway with other reprobates in bright orange vests. I wondered
whether any of my friends would spot her as the school bus traveled along 37 South.

For the rest of my childhood and throughout my adult years, I shaped and defined myself as an inversion of Trina McElvy. If
she had many lovers, I would have none. If she had a tenth-grade education, I would get a master’s degree. If she was unmarried
with one child, I’d be married with three. But in avoiding the worst in my mother, I’d also denied myself her best. The inescapable
truth about Trina McElvy was this: She was concupiscible, carnal, spontaneous, and, above all, happy.

Annie grabs the box of Strike ’Em Anywhere matches and relights the candle. “Julia, please raise your right hand and”—she
tilts her chair backward to grab a copy of
Oprah
magazine off the end table—“put your other hand on the Bible.” I do as I’m told, aware of a crazy little giggle percolating
in my throat. I keep my lips clamped for fear it will escape, turn into something bigger and more frightening and impossible
to constrain. “Julia Flanagan, from this day forward, you agree to live dangerously. Go forth and do something bad.”

I don’t know if it’s the lateness of the hour or the alcohol or the reluctantly conjured memory of my husband and Susie Margolis,
but I can feel a new resolve flood my bloodstream with all the force and conviction of a born-again conversion. On this night
I decide that I will take my friends’ advice and live dangerously. To heck with being good. And damn that Susie Margolis.

As predictably as the tough-stemmed dandelions that commandeer our lawn in April, puppy lust overtakes our family once a year.
Someone in the neighborhood will appear on the street with a tiny thing trotting weightlessly at the end of a bright new nylon
leash on tiny puppy feet and we are filled with desire. Caitlin, the eleven-year-old, will draw pictures of dogs and slip
them into Michael’s briefcase. Lucy, who is nearing her seventh birthday, will complain of vague physical ailments. (“I think
I have a caterpillar stuck inside my head and it itches me. I think a puppy would make the itching go away.”) Four-year-old
Jake, Caitlin’s apprentice in the art of parental manipulation, will tie a rope around his stuffed Dalmatian Benny and drag
it forlornly through the house, bumping it up and down the stairs, scraping it along the sidewalk, propping it up on the kitchen
table next to his cereal bowl. And he will look up at his father and ask, “Please, Dad? Can’t we please get a dog?”

Michael has implored me not to bring home any animals and given that it was one of his only premarital requests, I felt obligated
to comply, especially when his other demands were so benign—I had to promise I’d never throw him a surprise party, that we’d
never go to sleep in a fight, and that I’d kiss him first thing every morning, morning breath be damned.

Besides, it wasn’t Michael’s fault that he balked at getting a dog. Kathleen and Jim Flanagan taught their sons that cats
and dogs occupied the same category as used hypodermic needles: dirty, disease-bearing, menacing. They didn’t allow their
sons to have Play-Doh either, for fear it would attract “vermin.” At some point, one of Michael’s brothers secretly hid a
moth in a box in the basement and actually managed to keep it alive for over fifteen days, but little Michael stopped asking
for a dog and at an early age, probably more out of despair than anything else, finally acquiesced and absorbed his parents’
opposition.

I didn’t grow up with animals either, but only because our landlord prohibited all pets except fish and after the first goldfish
came down with the apt-named ick and died, I couldn’t bear to ask for another one. Katie Lender once managed to smuggle a
chicken into her rental by successfully incubating a fertilized egg under her father’s high-intensity desk lamp. She figured
she could always claim ignorance: how was she to know that the egg would turn into a pet? A spiteful neighbor called the landlord
and that was the end of the chicken. Katie’s parents insisted they’d sent Lester to live with a nice elderly couple on a big
farm, but Katie and I always suspected they just dumped her in the grass behind the JCPenney parking lot.